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It’s Official: The NFL Makes No Sense

The 2010 NFL season—one free of a salary cap—was supposed to be weird. But, after 10 weeks of play, it has moved beyond even the wildest expectations. Sunday’s set of games had enough zaniness and unpredictability to capture the season in a nutshell: a game-winning Hail Mary pass in Jacksonville, two overtime thrillers, the downtrodden Bills getting their first win, the previously hapless Broncos pouring it on the division-leading Chiefs and the Randy Moss-aided Titans getting unexpectedly squashed by the quarterback-starved Dolphins.

Associated Press

If anyone can’t be mad about a receiver like Dez Bryant catching a ball against his helmet, it’s a Giants fan.

Even the games that looked blah on paper, like Seattle at Arizona, managed some drama, with Matt Hasselbeck playing through a broken wrist and giving the career resurrection of Mike Williams a boost. This constant unpredictability is part of the reason football’s ratings are soaring, with even run-of-the-mill regular-season games drawing larger audiences than the World Series.

No game represented the season better than the previously 1-7 Cowboys beating the Giants 33-20 in New Meadowlands Stadium. You need two hands just to count the storylines. Division rivals. Huge upset. Jason Garrett wins his coaching debut. Jon Kitna unexpectedly picks apart the New York secondary. Dez Bryant cements himself as a serious threat with even Kitna under center. Eli Manning throws two interceptions, one returned for a Cowboys-record 101 yards. The stadium’s lights go out, leaving the fans and players in total darkness and delaying the game for 15 minutes. The Giants were 14-point favorites, but Dallas brought the fight they were supposed to have from Day One of the season and handed the Giants their third loss of the year. “If I’d have known it would have ended like this,” Giants co-owner John Mara told the New York Post’s Paul Schwartz after the game, “I would have kept the lights off.”

The Giants and Cowboys weren’t the only teams playing in weird circumstances on Sunday. The Miami Dolphins had to fight through losing two quarterbacks, as Chad Pennington injured his shoulder after two plays as the new starter, and replacement Chad Henne later hurt his knee. Instead of immediately going with third-stringer Tyler Thigpen in the third quarter—which would have triggered a rule disallowing Henne to return—the Dolphins decided to run the Wildcat until the fourth quarter, when playing Thigpen wouldn’t rule out a possible Henne return. In all, four Miami Dolphins—Pennington, Henne, Thigpen and wide receiver Brandon Marshall—threw a pass on Sunday. And as the only healthy quarterback, Thigpen will most likely be Miami’s new starter on Thursday, as the team scrambles to find suitable backups, including a rumored look at JaMarcus Russell. “How’s that for an unfathomable conclusion to an afternoon that was supposed to start and end with Henne on the bench?” Jeff Darlington of the Miami Herald writes. “And how’s this for an added twist: The Dolphins still beat the Titans 29-17.”

In Seattle, Mike Williams, who was out of the NFL the last two years, had 145 receiving yards and led the Seahawks to a win over the Cardinals, vaulting his team into first place in the NFC West. Williams, who also starred at USC for current coach Pete Carroll, leads the Seahawks in receptions (with 46) and ranks 12th in the NFC in receiving yards with 545. He managed those 145 yards on Sunday with a disgustingly broken pinkie finger that was injured by a pass in practice on Thursday. “It bent Williams’ finger back so badly,” Danny O’Neil of the Seattle Times writes, “it broke the skin, making it possible to see the bone.”

And the NFL’s last winless team finally caught a break and earned a victory on Sunday, as the Bills beat the Lions 14-12 in Buffalo. Detroit now has a 25-game winless streak on the road. “Comedians and joke writers will have to find another target now that the Buffalo Bills have finally broken their oh-for following eight consecutive defeats,” the Toronto Sun’s Mike Rutsey writes. “In looking for a different team to slag, the cheap-shot artists need look no further than the team that Buffalo finally beat — the Detroit Lions.”

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Manny Pacquiao bruised and bloodied Antonio Margarito Saturday in a lopsided decision, winning a belt in a record eighth weight class and helping to back up claims that he is the best in the sport.

“The inventory of superlatives,” ESPN’s Dan Rafael writes, “is beginning to run low when it comes to Pacquiao, the greatest fighter on the planet.”

More than anything, Tito Talao of the Manila Bulletin wants a fight that finally pairs Pacquiao with Mayweather. He also picks up on another aspect of the champ that has gone relatively underreported. Talao noticed that Pacquiao let up on Margarito towards the end of the fight, and picked out three instances in the 11th round where Pacquiao tried to indirectly suggest to referee Laurence Cole that maybe he should stop the fight. Cole let Margarito fight on, so Pacquiao took matters into his own hands, literally, by easing up on the hammering. Pacquiao confirmed after the fight that he did this on purpose: “I did not want to damage him permanently,” Pacquiao told the Associated Press. “That’s not what boxing is about“.

By sparing a man condemned to a brutal end, allowing him to step off the ring and back to his family, friends and countrymen with his dignity intact, his heart still in place, and his vision, hopefully, not irreparably damaged,” Talao writes, “Pacquiao became immeasurably bigger than he already was.”

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Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love registered a double-double, scoring 22 points and grabbing 17 rebounds Sunday in Atlanta. Given his own recent standards, this may qualify as a disappointment. Two nights earlier in New York, Love had 31 points and 31 rebounds against the Knicks, becoming the first player in 28 years to record a 30-30 game.

“It’s been so long since a player got 30 points and 30 rebounds in an NBA game,” the Oregonian’s Mike Tokito writes, “only one member of the Timberwolves, point guard Luke Ridnour, was alive when Houston’s Moses Malone got 32 points and 38 rebounds on Feb. 11, 1982.”

The event made for a nice sporting weekend in Minnesota, as the state’s lone major college football team also pulled out a comeback win against Illinois. The Star-Tribune’s Michael Rand concludes that the Golden Gophers win on the “shocker” scale by a nose. “Two sporting accomplishments this weekend sent Minnesota fans scurrying to cell phones, e-mail, Twitter and the good old-fashioned streets to exclaim, ‘Can you believe it?’” Rand writes. “And, for a nice change of pace, they were saying that in a good way.”

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